Dr. Eric Lander, of the BROAD Institute, recently gave a toast honoring Jim Watson at the close of the Biology of Genomes meeting. See below Twitter thread from Jonathan Eisen for an archived video copy of the toast. (Picture via: Sarah Tishkoff tweet)

Lander has now apologized for doing so in a tweet:

Last week I agreed to toast James Watson for the Human Genome Project on his 90th birthday. My brief comment about his being “flawed” did not go nearly far enough. His views are abhorrent: racist, sexist, anti-semitic. I was wrong to toast. I apologize.

Last week I agreed to toast James Watson for the Human Genome Project on his 90th birthday. My brief comment about his being “flawed” did not go nearly far enough. His views are abhorrent: racist, sexist, anti-semitic. I was wrong to toast. I apologize.

I applaud Dr. Lander for this apology.

This comes after a bit of a Twitter storm. If you wonder why some people see value in using social media to advance progressive ideas*, this is one example.

Some key threads from

Jonathan Eisen

Well - for those who missed out on one of the most repulsive events in the recent history of genomics - here is an Instagram post of a video of Eric Lander toasting the racist, sexist, antisemitic Jim Watson https://t.co/vOPQKfmLLh 1/n

Since not everyone is aware of how awful a human Jim Watson is, and therefore doesn't appreciate how utterly revolting it is that Eric Lander, for entirely self-serving reasons, chose to celebrate him, read this account of his 2000 talk at @UCBerkeleyhttps://t.co/VOdMWfz0O9

One of the most amazing things in all of the twitter discussion over the weekend is that there are still people who want to try to claim that Watson's decades of abhorrent ranting about people he disdains, tied in many cases to the scientific topics he is discussing and in others to the people he thinks should be allowed or disallowed to participate in science, have nothing to do with public accolades "for his scientific accomplishments".

We've finally found out, thanks to Nature News, that the paltry academic salary on which poor Jim Watson has been forced to rely is $375,000 per year as "chancellor emeritus" at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The current NIH salary limitation is $181,500, this is the maximum amount that can be charged to Federal grants. I'm here to tell you, most of us funded by NIH grants do not make anything like this as an annual salary.

Should you be allowed to make an anti-Semitic remark? Yes, because some anti-Semitism is justified....Francis Crick said we should pay poor people not to have children. I think now we're in a terrible situation where we should pay the rich people to have children. If there is any correlation between success and genes, IQ will fall if the successful people don't have children. These are self-obvious facts.If I had been married earlier in life, I wouldn't have seen the double helix. I would have been taking care of the kids on Saturday.

__
*Call it constantly angry performative social justice warrioring if you like. Whatever it takes. Just get er done.

I think Jack Heinemann made an excellent point in the linked twitter feed. though -- "Yet everyone was quiet when Jim held the strings of power and controlled the funding".

Back in the 1990s, when Watson still had real power, everyone in genomics just rolled their eyes when Watson said the damnedest things. It's only been since he's been retired that he's become a pariah.

If you were reviewing an NIH proposal from a PI who was a known (or widely rumored) sexual harasser, would you take that into account? How?

I don't know about "widely rumored". But if I was convinced someone was a sexual harasser this would render me unable to fairly judge the application. So I would recuse myself and tell the SRO why I was doing so. As one is expected to do for any conflicts that one recognizes about the proposal.

Watson may be sexist and has certainly made some rather course comments, but the incident that got him banned from polite (i.e. politically correct society) is that he let slip the truth in an interview about race differences in intelligence. He made a comment to the effect that all the studies indicate that black intelligence is lower than that of whites, hence he was pessimistic about Africa's future. He did not even mention the magnitude of the IQ gap between whites and black Africans, which is about two standard deviations. That this IQ gap exists is a fact that, to my knowledge, no expert in the field disputes. The only thing that makes some people become hysterical is when it is suggested that any portion of the IQ gap has a genetic basis. At this point, however, the evidence for a significant genetic contribution is overwhelming. I understand that this is a very unfortunate reality, with huge implications for society, but to deny reality is unbecoming to anyone who claims the title of scientist.
Btw, the "ass kick by Greg Laden" links did not link to anything useful. Can anyone offer any good evidence or argument to support the claim that all races have identical intelligences? Can anyone offer a sound evolutionary explanation as to why one would even expect that all races should have evolved identical levels of intelligence? These are honest questions. I have investigated this subject a lot, and have yet to find satisfactory answers.

Seriously, DM? That's your response? An unreferenced blog post? I commend you for allowing my comment to pass the PC filter, but please, give me little more. I will be happy to provide you with peer-reviewed literature citations, if you wish. I only ask that you do the same in return. I also, respectfully, ask when and why you adopted the current state egalitarian religion. Did you thoughtfully consider the one and only tenet of that religion and conclude it to be true, or did you conclude it to be true without rational consideration?

Wow, skeptic, talk about turd in the punch bowl. We were just celebrating the humiliation of a nonagenarian and his old think. I mean he was toasted, Toasted! in public! surely you cannot expect this to be tolerated.

At this point, however, the evidence for a significant genetic contribution is overwhelming.

Bullshit. Within population genetic contributions to IQ have been estimated, but between population differences have not. In addition to heritable contributions, a substantial fraction of the variation in IQ can be explained by environmental effects (see the Flynn Effect). As a quantitative trait, variation in IQ would also be subject to gene-environment interactions. There have been no adequately powered GWAS on IQ that take into account population structure, which would be needed to identify allelic differences between populations that would explain population-level differences in IQ. We do have strong evidence for strong environmental effects on IQ, and there are large environmental differences across populations. Anyone arguing that there is *overwhelming* evidence that racial differences in IQ are genetic is espousing pseudoscientific racism.

That is correct -- there is no evidence for genetic contribution to the gap in IQ. More likely than not it is primarily environmental. Making such statements is not helping at all.

For the gap is very much real, and it is very much a real problem that you are indeed not allowed to even say that it exists.

Which is baffling -- presumably if we are truly concerned about equality between all people, we would be doing our best to help the situation in Africa (and in inner cities in the US) improve to the point where environmental conditions are equally favorable for everyone's development...

Somehow I don't see the thought police doing much in that direction though.

Maybe because you cannot work towards addressing a problem the existence of which you refuse to acknowledge. Maybe because there is actually no real concern about equality, and this is all a unconscious but very clever and effective tactic to elevate one's own social status by reaping the benefits of being the self-proclaimed "protector" of the oppressed. Maybe it's some combination of those things, or something else, who knows...

I am afraid you are off target, Salty. Yes, there have been many studies of within population heritability of IQ, and they all converge on about 80% by the time a person reaches adulthood. That leaves a 20% environmental contribution. The problem is no one has figured out how to change the environment to maximize that remaining 20%. Even very intensive early childhood interventions have not succeeded in producing any noteworthy long term IQ gains. Given the high within group heritability of IQ, it is very plausible to speculate that a good fraction of the between group difference is also heritable. But one need not merely assume this; it has been tested, via adoption studies among other things. For anyone interested in objectively reviewing the race IQ gap and its genetic component, I would suggest 1) Rushton and Jensen (2005) "30 years of research on race differences in cognitive ability." Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 11: 235-294. 2) Richard Nisbett's rebuttal to (1) is in the same issue, p. 302-310. 3) Richard Nisbett's book "Intelligence and how to get it" (2010) contains a not-too-lengthy section on the black-white IQ gap in which he argues for a 100% environmental cause. 4) Rushton and Jensen wrote a review of Nisbett's book in which they provide a point-by-point rebuttal. The Open Psychology Journal 3: 9-35.
There are currently GWAS studies going on that continue to identify more genes associated with intelligence. See Hill et al. (2018) Molecular Psychiatry (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-017-0001-5). GWAS studies for intelligence-associated genes are, of course, complicated by the fact that so many genes influence intelligence. But as these studies progress, the one thing that is certain is that the genes for intelligence will not be distributed equally among all human populations.
The assumption that all races have identical intelligences is very difficult to reconcile with the state of the world. Blacks live at or near the bottom of the SES ladder in majority white countries with or without a history of slavery and segregation. And living standards are far worse for blacks in majority black countries. If all races have identical intelligences, there should be at least one example of a predominantly black country somewhere in the world that could be considered prosperous by Western standards. Is there one? (Wakanda doesn't count)

I will also add that the chinese generally do not have the taboos concerning genetics and intelligence that is present in the west. They appear to be riding hard into the area with a new 1Billion investment on genetic-IQ issues. Currently it is possible to select fetus with superior characteristics (as determined with DNA testing) for implantation. Genetic engineering to boost desirable traits is not far off. Brave new world- it's chugging down the tracks.

""If all races have identical intelligences, there should be at least one example of a predominantly black country somewhere in the world that could be considered prosperous by Western standards. Is there one? (Wakanda doesn't count)"

Here you're assuming that intelligence is somehow a determinant of prosperity both at the individual and society levels. At the society level, this is just a blatant disregard for history. At the individual level, I don't know how you can be certain that this is true, given that all the indicators are co-mingled. Family wealth affects IQ, as does education level of parents. It is not axiomatically true that more intelligent people have a higher predilection for attaining advanced degrees (in fact, the current state of academia would belie that inference). And in fact, some studies have isolated an environmental component amongst well educated households, in genetically identical children as well: https://news.virginia.edu/content/iq-children-better-educated-households-higher-study-twins-indicates-0. Given what we know about the restricted access to these resources in the USA, such disparities in wealth and educational attainment may make up the entire perceived "racial" difference, and not genetics. And as far as I know, know Western country has a minority black population that has not had a history of discrimination or disparate misfortune. I'd be interested in hearing of one, though.

You're also eliding the significance of cultural barriers in confounding the accurate measurement of intelligence. For instance, if the tests, in the course of constructing a math problem, asked me about chitterlings, I"d have to spend at least a little bit of mental exertion to recall that these are a disgusting food served in the South and overcome the urge to vomit in my mouth a little, before answering. That could cost me some points.

" But as these studies progress, the one thing that is certain is that the genes for intelligence will not be distributed equally among all human populations."
-One, your use of the term "genes for intelligence" demonstrates your unsophisticated grasp on this subject. There are not, "genes for intelligence" there are, probably, allelic variants that contribute differentially to processes that would make one more or less intelligent, as measured in a limited way, defined by imperfect tests. Two, there is no way of knowing that these alleles will be distributed between population in such a way that they will produce a meaningfully disparate outcome.

Now, having responded to your claims, I'd like you to answer two questions. Why do you care so much that intelligence be proven to be the ultimate arbiter of social hierarchy, and that it have a predominately genetic basis, and one that explains the race gap in IQ scores? Why does it matter enough to argue about?

About race and genetics: I'm going to use white to mean "ancestors a few thousand years ago lived in Europe", black is "ancestors a few thousand years ago lived in Africa", and asian means "ancestors a few thousand years ago lived in China".

If you could somehow plot difference between people on a 2d plane, you might think of the human race as some kind of triangle with white, black and asian at the three vertices, and everyone falling somewhere within that triangle. That's not accurate.

A much more accurate view is something like the human race is a big black circle. White and asian people form an island inside that circle. Black people could be anywhere inside the circle.

This is consistent with history: 200k years ago all of our ancestors were black people in africa. They had lived there intermixing for millions of years. Then about 100k years ago a small group left africa and ended up colonizing india/china/north america/etc. Some broke off from that group and colonized europe.

So, all white/asian people descend from that small group. When you look at genetic diversity today, you see that there is more genetic diversity in Africa than in the rest of the world.

Better is not something we can easily quantify in genetics, but diversity is. It is very clear that black people have more genetic diversity that white/asian.

I would guess that this might have something to do with the general observation that black people are over represented in some professional sports where genetics give an advantage. It's not that the 'average black guy' can jump higher or run faster than the 'average white guy'. It's that the distribution for black people is wider than for white people, because of the greater genetic diversity in black people. So when you look at the extremes, the fastest runners or highest jumpers, you get an overrepresentation of black people.

If intelligence had anything to do with genetics, I would expect the same. My guess is that the environmental effects dwarf any genetic effects on intelligence. There's all kinds of problems with the GWAS intelligence studies that identify SNP variants associated with intelligence. I honestly don't think they will hold up over time.

"Here you're assuming that intelligence is somehow a determinant of prosperity both at the individual and society levels. At the society level, this is just a blatant disregard for history."

Not sure what you are referring to here, but at least with regard to the world as it stands today, I suggest you read "IQ and global inequality" by Richard Lynn and Tatu van Hanen. High IQ populations generally build pleasant societies (North Korea being a notable exception); low IQ populations build ... well, let's just say "outhouse countries." With regard to success at the individual level, IQ is the single best predictor of a range of different life outcomes, including career success (or lack thereof), criminality, teenage pregnancy, welfare dependency, etc. see for example the infamous Bell Curve. Basically, high IQ is associated with good life outcomes, and low IQ with the opposite.

"Family wealth affects IQ, as does education level of parents."

Of course it does, but IQ also affects family wealth and the education level of the parents. In fact, IQ is a stronger predictor of an individuals adult SES, than ones childhood SES predicts ones IQ (see for example Arthur Jensen's "the g factor).

"It is not axiomatically true that more intelligent people have a higher predilection for attaining advanced degrees"

Yes, it is. In fact, many GWAS studies are now using educational attainment as a proxy for IQ, given that racial disparities have made IQ a taboo subject.

"And as far as I know, know Western country has a minority black population that has not had a history of discrimination or disparate misfortune. I'd be interested in hearing of one, though."

That would include virtually every country in Western Europe, Canada, and Australia. If you think their poor outcomes in those countries are do to discrimination, I would ask you to explain the success of other minority groups in those countries. Ashkenazi Jews, for example, are among the most successful minority groups in every country they occupy, and they have certainly faced their fair share of discrimination. Not surprisingly, they also have the highest average IQ of any population. And once again, your comment leaves us having to explain the state of every country in SS-Africa and Haiti. If you provide the standard liberal response of "colonialism," I would ask you to explain Liberia and Ethiopia, which were never colonized and can hold their own with respect to any other outhouse country.

Your implication that cultural barriers explain the poor performance of some groups on IQ tests is so old and debunked, that it is amazing anyone still makes it. In fact, the black-white IQ gap is greatest on the *least* culturally influenced, i.e. the most g-loaded tests, for example, Raven's progressive matrices.

"One, your use of the term "genes for intelligence" demonstrates your unsophisticated grasp on this subject."

I contemplated for a moment using the term "alleles for intelligence," but did not since one more often hears the expression "genes for intelligence." This may be the common expression for the sake of lay audiences. However, if it makes you feel better to believe my grasp of the subject is unsophisticated, go ahead.

"Now, having responded to your claims, I'd like you to answer two questions. Why do you care so much that intelligence be proven to be the ultimate arbiter of social hierarchy, and that it have a predominately genetic basis, and one that explains the race gap in IQ scores? Why does it matter enough to argue about?"

My main goal in trying to educate people about racial disparities in IQ is to help dismantle the racism industrial complex. At the moment every failure of non-whites, particularly blacks, to achieve equity with whites is blamed on white racism. This is simply false and generates a tremendous amount of hatred by blacks against whites and undoubtedly is a major contributor to the epidemic of black on white violent crime. Thus, as whites move towards minority status in the United States and elsewhere, we are on track to becoming not merely a minority, but a hated minority. It also matters a great deal with regard to immigration policy and what type of country we wish to become. We are currently bringing in a large number of people (not all of them) from low IQ countries, under the assumption that we have some sort of magic dirt that will transform them into future doctors, scientists, and engineers. This is false. The majority of these people are net tax consumers and the best possible outcome is that we end up resembling Brazil. I would rather not live in an outhouse country, nor do I want my children to live in one.

DM, as the host of this blog you might want to chime in at some point here. Do you care to explain how so many physical differences between races could evolve while only one human organ, our most energetically expensive human organ, the human brain, was somehow exempt from the forces of natural selection?

JL, do facts have any effect on the pig? Have you tried any? Is "deep racism" the latest euphemism for "thought crime?"

Let's dig deeper. Do you believe in a spherical Earth? Why? Do you believe that the sun is at the center of our solar system? Why? Do you believe in the evolution of life on Earth? How far back? Back to the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA)? Is the human species included in this grand tree of life? If you do believe in science and what science has to say about evolution, please tell me in dispassionate, factual, and scientific terms how anything I have said is false. I realize that the comments I have made are heretical by contemporary societal orthodoxy, but ... Galileo ... Darwin ... enough said.

BTW, kudos to Drug Monkey. I know he is a high priest of the new state religion of egalitarianism, but I have to give him credit for his tolerance of dissident ideas.

please tell me in dispassionate, factual, and scientific terms how anything I have said is false.

This is pissing into the wind since you have a preconceived hypothesis backed by tribalism and confirmation bias. But just in case there are lurkers who cannot see through your bullshit...

You have made several strained arguments that are not backed by data, our understanding of human evolution, and the genetics of complex traits. First, your arguments that alleles associated with high intelligence are *certain* to segregate at different frequencies across populations does not hold water. There are a great many traits for which this is not true, with no current evidence that intelligence is an exception. GWAS can identify loci associated with a given trait within a population, but are essentially useless between populations. There's a reason that the GWAS on IQ are all using UK citizens (and throwing out ethnic outliers). What is clear from these GWAS is that intelligence is highly polygenic with many loci of small effect sizes, which likely makes it more difficult for selection to act upon on small time scales. The best known cases of recent human evolution are not polygenic (e.g. lactose tolerance, sickle cell) or are polygenic but have some large effect loci (skin pigmentation, high altitude adaptation). In these cases, we also have a strong understanding of the selective pressures shaping variation. Without a clear understanding of selective pressure, evolutionary genetics is prone to bullshit storytelling. Regardless, it is not *certain* that alleles associated with intelligence will segregate differently across populations.

Second, you discount the fact that a trait can be both heritable and plastic. While IQ is certainly heritable (though 80% is at the highest end of recent estimates, and your citation of that figure instead of a range is telling), this does not mean that gene-environment interactions are not important. The Flynn Effect clearly demonstrates that while IQ is still highly heritable, entire group averages can still increase. Unless you are arguing that this is due to human evolution within single generations, this is environmental. Adoption studies show a higher correlation of IQ with the biological mother than biological father, suggesting that the prenatal environment matters (this is very unlikely due to X-linkage, because intelligence is highly polygenic). Incidentally, adoption from a poor to rich home is associated with a 10-20 point gain in IQ. The Minnesota transracial adoption study was confounded by the fact that the black children were adopted later in life, and moreover, found no difference between the IQs of black vs. mixed race children (which contradicts a genetic basis for the differences, as does frankly the amount of admixture in the US African-American population). National IQs can fluctuate wildly across generations and correlate with national wealth. There are numerous examples, but one is the fact that East and West Germans had a 10-point IQ gap through the Cold War.

Last point, but one related to policy. A meta-analysis by Tucker-Drob and Bates found that the heritability of IQ was 26% for US individuals raised in poor households vs. 61% for those raised in rich households. This heritability gap was nearly non-existent in countries that provide universal access to high-quality health care and education, providing a strong argument in favor of working to improve the environment of our underprivileged citizens.

" High IQ populations generally build pleasant societies (North Korea being a notable exception); low IQ populations build ... well, let's just say "outhouse countries." "
- So there's the usual caveat that correlation does not equal causation. And even if the two were causally linked, it is simply not possible to know which is the proximal cause. That book you cite correlated IQ with a couple indicators, such as literacy, democratization, and life expectancy. The first two of those are highly cultural outcomes (and the third to a degree) which confounds the directionality, even if one is assuming a causal relationship. It could be that low national IQ leads people to form worse societies, but it is more likely that being raised in a worse society leads to a lower IQ score, given the robust data that shows that performance on IQ tests is highly influenced by environment (such as the literacy of your parents and their education levels).

This becomes apparent when you broaden your definition of what constitutes a "nice" society. Mongolia is up there near the top of high IQ countries. Would you rather live there than, say, Chile, which is closer to the middle of the pack in IQ, but higher than many high IQ countries on the quality of life scale provided by the Economist: https://www.economist.com/media/pdf/QUALITY_OF_LIFE.pdf

Same goes for Russia vs Jamaica, and a whole host of other comparisons. The authors of those studies clearly advantaged their preferred hypothesis in terms of the correlates to IQ that they chose to look at. Though I will hasten to note I have not read the book itself, just a summary.

"That would include virtually every country in Western Europe, Canada, and Australia. "
-Australia, at least, has a very similar problem in their Aboriginal populations, due to a very similar legacy of racism and marginalization. Canada had slavery, and the history of Western Europe's marginalization of Africans and people of African descent is so extensive that your feigning ignorance of it seems disingenuous.

"I would ask you to explain the success of other minority groups in those countries. Ashkenazi Jews, for example, are among the most successful minority groups in every country they occupy, and they have certainly faced their fair share of discrimination."
While they have faced discrimination, they can much more effectively "pass" in a society dominated by others of the same general skin tone (i.e. they are not a "visible minority" to use the social sciences term). They also share culture with the dominant racial groups of the society they live in, which again, makes it easier to thrive in said society.

"If you provide the standard liberal response of "colonialism," I would ask you to explain Liberia and Ethiopia, which were never colonized and can hold their own with respect to any other outhouse country"
-Ethiopia, at least, was occupied by the Italians leading up to WWII, and subject to a coup orchestrated by the Communists, and then an invasion by Somalia. So I'd say the historical antecedents for discord and struggle there are quite prominent.
Liberia started as a colony, composed primarily by black Americans, in the middle of the 19th century. You should seriously read more about the history. It shows that imperialism has nothing to do with race, just an attitude. The end results, however, were the same, coups and civil wars, which, again, provide a much more plausible explanation for their civil discord than racial grouping. In fact, under your theory Liberia should be doing much better than other African nations, since a large population there have substantial admixture of European Caucasian genes (from their enslaved ancestors).

"This is simply false and generates a tremendous amount of hatred by blacks against whites and undoubtedly is a major contributor to the epidemic of black on white violent crime. "
-And you think trying to tell these same groups that they are simply genetically inferior will have a different effect? Even if you believe all this racial theory of intelligence stuff, where is harping on it going to get you?

"Thus, as whites move towards minority status in the United States and elsewhere, we are on track to becoming not merely a minority, but a hated minority."
-Isn't this a reason to step up efforts to redress racial inequality (even if you disagree about the cause of it), rather than exacerbate it?

" We are currently bringing in a large number of people (not all of them) from low IQ countries, under the assumption that we have some sort of magic dirt that will transform them into future doctors, scientists, and engineers. "

They're more likely to have advanced degrees than US citizens (and way more likely then their native population). By your own admission, that means they're likely to have much higher IQs.

So I don't think your stated reasons for worrying so much that influx of people from low IQ nations is holding up. And as DM pointed out, there are parts of the country where the average white IQ is lower. Are you not worried about those places becoming "outhouses"?

So, in addition the scientific merits (or lack thereof) your focusing on this issue:
1) subjects you to the scorn of the PC community.
2) is at odds to the goal (racial harmony/avoiding being a hated minority) that you claim to support.
3) is not well supported by current immigration statistics (the net influx of immigrants likely has an as high or higher IQ than the current population).

Thanks for the reply, Salty, though as your name implies, you have likely been marinated in quite a bit of old-school thinking on the heritability of IQ, for example your claim that the the IQs of "full" black and mixed race children in the Minnesota transracial adoption study developed the same IQs is simply wrong. The mixed race adoptees developed IQs almost exactly intermediate between the white and black IQs, even when the adoptive parents thought the child was entirely black. Also, the heritability estimates of IQ (in adulthood) I cite are entirely mainstream. Even the APA, in response to the Bell Curve, acknowledged that IQ heritability is "about 75%). It is lower in childhood, which may be the sources of the lower estimates you found.
The Flynn effect is a favorite topic of the egalitarian left, and it really is something of a mystery. See "The g factor" for a very good discussion of the subject. I think the explanation that can account for the greatest proportion of the effect is the shift of the left end of the bell curve, through better nutrition, healthcare, etc, though this may not explain all of it. In any case, what is not widely advertised is that the Flynn effect appears to have come to an end in developed countries, and has even begun to reverse in some countries (possibly as the result of immigration). Regardless, whether the subject is climate change, evolution, or a heliocentric solar system, I am always curious to investigate contrary information. If you are so inclined, would you please provide me with references to your following claims:
1) Adoption studies show a higher correlation of IQ with the biological mother than biological father.
2) adoption from a poor to rich home is associated with a 10-20 point gain in IQ. (I think I know what you might have in mind here.)
3) National IQs can fluctuate wildly across generations and correlate with national wealth. There are numerous examples, but one is the fact that East and West Germans had a 10-point IQ gap through the Cold War. (This one sounds plausible and I would be interested to read about it. I never claimed that a very poor environment cannot lower IQ, though a 10 point gap between West and East Germany would surprise me).
4) A meta-analysis by Tucker-Drob and Bates found that the heritability of IQ was 26% for US individuals raised in poor households vs. 61% for those raised in rich households. (This sounds like it could be largely explained by the great variation in households defined as poor, but I would still like to investigate it.)

Lastly, I will humbly ask again, do you have any evolutionary theory to explain why you would expect that different human populations, separated for tens of thousands of years, and exposed to wildly different environments should have necessarily developed identical intelligences?

jmz4, I am not quite sure how to effectively approach your righteous indignation to the thoughtcrime I freely admit I allowed to become speechcrime (writecrime?) While I am tempted to respond to each of your comments, I have done this before to little effect, so I will respond to just one (hoping to get a considered response). Here is the comment:

"While they have faced discrimination, they can much more effectively "pass" in a society dominated by others of the same general skin tone (i.e. they are not a "visible minority" to use the social sciences term)."

Yes, that explanation works for most (Ashkenazi) Jews, but how does that explanation work for East Asians or (dot) Indians, both of which are quite visible minorities? Also, both groups are financially more successful (the standard measure of success) than whites in the USA? Why have evil whites focused all their hateful hatred on a subset of sun-people, while exempting clearly visible minority sun people (dot Indians), as well as clearly visible minority ice people (East Asians)?

Jzm4, I forgot to add at the end of my last response the same, very basic question I will repeat after each of my comments, henceforth:

Do you have any evolutionary theory to explain why you would expect that different human populations, separated for tens of thousands of years, and exposed to wildly different environments should have necessarily developed identical intelligences?

E. Holder did call us cowards for the failure to have honest discussion of race! In this light let me congratulate Skeptic and his interlocutors on an uncomfortable, but good, discussion. Let me also express appreciation for DM. He is a liberal puke, to be sure, but he has integrity. That counts for more in my twisted books!

Human Evolution Realists say that intelligence is unevenly distributed among different population groups (sometimes called races) just like every other measurable characteristic is distributed unevenly among different population groups.

We say that intelligence is unevenly distributed for the same reason all those other characteristics are unevenly distributed; population founder effects, environmental selection & sexual selection.

Human Evolution Deniers say that every other measurable characteristic is unevenly distributed among different population groups, but that for some reason intelligence is exactly equal among them all.

I am very curious as to how they would explain this. There are exactly two possibilities why this would be so:

1) Because intelligence variance between different population groups CANNOT happen.
Or
2) Intelligence variance between different population groups CAN theoretically happen, but it NEVER HAS.

I have posed this question to Human Evolution Deniers multiple times, and have never received a clear answer for it.

> Do you have any evolutionary theory to explain why you would expect that different human populations, separated for tens of thousands of years, and exposed to wildly different environments should have necessarily developed identical intelligences?

Skeptic, theories don't matter. Observations do.

The observation is that I can almost 100% distinguish east asian/european/african descent people based on their looks. So, that evolved differently.

However, I can't distinguish these populations based on their intelligence. It could have happened. It could have been that one group has vastly different intelligence, just like facial features. It could have been that these intelligence differences are easy to observe, like the difference between a cow and a monkey. But that is not the observation.

Any average differences in intelligence between these populations is swamped by the variation within the population and the inability we have of measuring small differences in intelligence.

SidVic, when people like Eric Holder or Oprah Winfrey call for a "discussion" or "conversation" about race, this thread is not what they have in mind. What they actually mean is for YT to sit down and shut up while they explain to whites how much they suck. The only thing they want to hear from whites, if anything, is enthusiastic agreement.

East vs. West Germany IQ (plus many others) is from Lynn and Vanhanen's IQ and the Wealth of Nations.

Tucker-Drob and Bates 2015; doi 10.1177/0956797615612727

Do you have any evolutionary theory to explain why you would expect that different human populations, separated for tens of thousands of years, and exposed to wildly different environments should have necessarily developed identical intelligences?

There are numerous traits that do not vary across human populations, and for positive selection to occur and be discernible between small populations, the selective pressure would have to be very strong. We see this with lactose tolerance and high altitude adaptation, and there are signatures of selection at those loci in the genome. While it's easy to come up with just-so stories of strong selection on intelligence, there's no evidence that selective pressure on intelligence differed across human populations, and we do not know enough about the causal polymorphisms underlying variation in intelligence to identify signatures of selection. Plus, the null hypothesis for evolutionary genetics should be that any heritable differences between populations (especially if they are small effective population sizes like prehistoric humans) are due to neutral drift. There is obviously a strong environmental component to differences in IQ across populations, and there are many traits that do not vary across populations, so I do not see why the default position should be that differences in intelligence between groups are heritable.

"I am not quite sure how to effectively approach your righteous indignation to the thoughtcrime I freely admit I allowed to become speechcrime (writecrime?)"
-I'm afraid that's eisegesis on your part. I have no righteous indignation on this subject, and none was present in my response. You seem to think you're promulgating some sort of taboo knowledge, but examining racial and or disparities in various physiological features is perfectly legitimate scientific inquiry. What people object to (get self-righteous about) are the odious solutions often put forward by people with a particular interest in proving people of African descent to be genetically inferior in regards to intelligence. You haven't done that, for the most part.

"Yes, that explanation works for most (Ashkenazi) Jews, but how does that explanation work for East Asians or (dot) Indians, both of which are quite visible minorities? Also, both groups are financially more successful (the standard measure of success) than whites in the USA?"
-The short answer is that because they are, 1) mostly highly educated immigrants and their children, and 2) weren't subject to 4 generations of institutionalized racism. This has resulted in materially different histories of white on black and white on asian discrimination. The long answer is out there on the internet if you care to look. Here's a place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_minority

An interesting point about Indians, they have the highest median incomes in this country of any racial group, but one of the lowest "national IQs" at 85, which is 3 points lower than Mexicans, who have a much lower median income. How do you explain that discrepancy in your racial basis of IQ theory? Either IQ isn't really a good determinate of success, or the racial IQ scores of groups of non-Western people are meaningless, or we're selectively importing the high IQ people (see model minority discussion and rebutting your overblown fears of immigration).

"Do you have any evolutionary theory to explain why you would expect that different human populations, separated for tens of thousands of years, and exposed to wildly different environments should have necessarily developed identical intelligences?"
-1) No one (here) is positing completely identical racial intelligences. There is a heritable genetic component to intelligence. But, we are just saying that the large measurable differences in IQ between races are not sufficiently explained by the small genetic differences between populations, given the current state of knowledge and the likely huge effects of socioeconomic factors. This is further compounded by the inexact nature of "race" as a proxy for genetic haplotype.

2) "Wildly different environments?" What kind of environments would favor the selection of advanced intelligence?

3) Yes, I have theories. The simplest one is that above average intelligence was simply not under positive selection during the period of human existence (which is a short period on evolutionary timescales), and neutral genetic drift hasn't created any meaningful differences between the population of humans designated as discrete races (more on that below).

Do you have any evidence that more intelligent people produce more (or less) progeny and thus intelligence could be a selected upon trait?

Another plausible theory is that there are racial differences in intelligence, but they are completely swamped out by the environmental factors such as poor prenatal nutrition and or lead contamination of air and water.

Another problem with your argument. Race is just a (poor) proxy for genetic grouping. You've heard the argument that race is a social construct? This is somewhat true. Two African Americans aren't necessarily more genetically similar than two Caucasian Americans (let alone "white" Americans). This makes possible genetic differences between black and white Americans even more irrelevant to the issue of the IQ gaps, since they are done by racial or ethnic groupings, not by any sensible phylogeny of haplotypes.

Also, for the record:
There are broad physiological parameters that have been shown to not vary by race. Like resting heartbeat and core temperature, for instance. Visual acuity was very slightly better in AA's, though they had a lopsided sample and there obviously could be environmental confounds there. Not too many papers get published on negative data, but I'm sure there is more out there. And of course, at the molecular level, such things are very poorly characterized, but could be critical to understanding human intelligence.

Well, I was hoping this thread might die, but since you did pose some questions, I suppose it would be polite to respond. Honestly, I am at a point in this discussion where I found myself in college, many years ago, when debating with creationists over evolution. The mentality of the religious left on this subject is at least as irrational as that of the religious right, or at least the creationist subset thereof. While creationists deny that evolution ever occurred, the religious left generally believes in evolution, while simultaneously believing that human evolution above the neck magically ceased the moment humans left Africa. Frankly, creationism is more consistent with a belief in racial equality, because one can simply claim that God made them all equal. I have found that the bottom line is, you can't reason a person out of a belief that they didn't reason themselves into.

"-The short answer is that because they are, 1) mostly highly educated immigrants and their children, and 2) weren't subject to 4 generations of institutionalized racism."
The last half century+ has seen a Herculean effort on the part of whites to better the lives of blacks (affirmative action, government programs and agencies, black history month, the deification of Martin Luther King, etc). Hollywood has also done its part by virtually always portraying blacks in a positive light in film and television. When a film requires a villain or criminal, you can be pretty sure that role will be filled by a white guy. The corporate media has also done its part by consistently concealing the grossly disproportionate share of crime committed by blacks. Instead, the media promotes the false narrative that blacks are relentless victims of relentless white racism, every where all the time, that explains everything. And once again, if all black problems are due to white racism, why do blacks, on average, have considerably worse lives in black-ruled, majority black countries? Also, how does one explain the Asian phenomenon. At the end of WWII, Japan was a pile of rubble, but it quickly rebuilt and became a rich and prosperous country. In 1960, South Korea, had a GDP per capita that was lower than many countries in SS Africa, but look at it now. And China, once it through off the shackles of economic communism, has seen a meteoric rise in wealth. Also, look at how South Africa has fared since the transition to black rule. Sure, you can propose a variety or Rube-Goldberg explanations for all of these observations, but it is far simpler to posit that different races build different societies. They are not interchangeable. And let's be honest, the only reason that so many people perform the mental gymnastics required to maintain a belief in equality is because it is such a taboo subject. How it became such a taboo is a mystery.

How do you explain [the Indian] discrepancy in your racial basis of IQ theory? Hmm. You offered three possibilities. I think you can guess which is correct. India is a huge and very diverse country and we are skimming off their best. One can argue about whether it is ethical to do that.

"-1) No one (here) is positing completely identical racial intelligences. There is a heritable genetic component to intelligence."
Uh Oh! You might want to walk that one back. If you open the door to any portion of racial IQ gaps being genetic, you have now invited the question of how much. This is likely why the IQ gap itself is systematically ignored by all the powers that be.

"2) "Wildly different environments?" What kind of environments would favor the selection of advanced intelligence?"
The most plausible explanation I have heard is that cold environments select for intelligence. Survival during periods when the ground is covered in snow, and there is minimal availability of food, requires forward planning, which is a form of intelligence. Almost no forward planning is required when the availability of food is consistent year round. Of course, intelligence also evolved in the context of civilization beginning ~10,000 years ago. See for example Cochran and Harpending's "the 10,000 year explosion." It is not difficult to posit models in which particular specialties required more intelligence than others (just like today); speaking of which?

"Do you have any evidence that more intelligent people produce more (or less) progeny and thus intelligence could be a selected upon trait?"

In the context of a civilization, more intelligent people are able to acquire more resources and hence, support more children. Prior to the advent of the welfare state, dimwits, especially men, likely had few opportunities for mating and if they did, they would have difficulty supporting the offspring they produced. Contrast that with today, where we literally pay low IQ single mothers to stay at home and breed. In contrast, the most educated women today are having the fewest children. We are literally replicating the movie "Idiocracy."

"Another problem with your argument. Race is just a (poor) proxy for genetic grouping. You've heard the argument that race is a social construct?"

I have heard that phrase many times, and few things say brainwashed quite as strongly as the utterance of that phrase. In fact, that phrase could easily be added to a modern version of the party mantra of 1984: Ignorance is strength, War is peace, freedom is slavery, race is a social construct. Your comment about between or within group racial similarity basically restates Lewontin's fallacy. Richard Lewontin stated that there is more within race genetic diversity than between race diversity. And therefore racial classification is meaningless. That, of course, is true for alleles at individual loci, but it is an idiotic argument, because race is defined by differential distributions of alleles at *many* loci. And when you look at many loci, race can be determined with essentially 100% accuracy.

"There are broad physiological parameters that have been shown to not vary by race. Like resting heartbeat and core temperature, for instance."

Thank you. I was racking my brain over Salty's comment about numerous traits that do not vary between races. Now that you mention it, I can think of some others, e.g. the general body plans show little variation by race, as do the number of fingers and toes. The general arrangement of the internal organs are also remarkably consistent. Of course, evolution has a much easier time tweaking other traits that do show broad variation between races, e.g. skin color, body hair, height, fat distribution, and, well -- intelligence.

For the record, I really wish that racial differences in intelligence did not exist, because it is creating huge problems for Western civilization, which are only going to get worse (for example, google the world's most important graph.) However, in the words of another high priest of the religious left, Stephen J. Gould: "Nature doesn't give a damn about my preferences."

Ahem, against my better judgement, i will keep this stinker going... I will also state that i think that IQ is an overblown measure of how good a person is, or whatever. I think some points were lost in the verbosity
To summarize the discussion as I read it:
conceded-
sub-saharan IQ average ~ 70 (2SD) AA~85
Contentious- the degree of heritability of IQ- dont want to touch this with long pole
I will approach the matter from a practical standpoint (i invite corrections as the math as it will be sloppy, memorial weekend). The US military is a good resource for these matters as they have been running a 70yr experiment on cognitive testing and performance. They have concluded that <80 IQ is "untrainable"
In Afghanistan, efforts were made to set up an electrical grid. At control substations you need (coarsely) a smarter then average tech, say IQ 115. It's complicated to run a station. When the average of population IQ is 100 then 4-7 guys outa 100 have IQ 115. As one moves from AVE of 100 to 70. this number can decrease to 1 in 10k with 115 IQ. Point is: talent on the ground gets very scarce and infrastructure can't be maintained. Essentially, Watson s point.

in high iq ranges 130+ seemingly small changes in ave, or shape of the bell, curve can lead huge changes in the numbers on the ground. That the leaders and mover-and-shakers.

Extensive efforts to change environment to move needle on IQ for last 30yrs have been extremely disappointing as sckeptic noted. lest you think me some monster, I'm horrified. Africa is at 800 million souls. modern agriculture has supported a population boom. Die off- cute kids ..everybody, mass migration, war major dislocation is coming. Our civilization depends on the trucks getting to the cities. Maybe, just maybe, the a**hole Watson has truths to offer. Consider it, at least.

This was an interesting discussion. I'm no geneticist, but I am well aware that genomics researchers tag their samples with information on ethnicity, since so many diseases are correlated with different ethnic groups.

The fundamental question in this blog that wasn't answered in any satisfactory form concerns the rationale for believing that intelligence is not subject to evolutionary forces.

Why should so many other characteristics (e.g., testosterone levels) differ between racial groups, but not intelligence?

I note that one of the proposed mechanisms for the development of higher IQ in Ashkenazi Jews (which, by the way, most people do not challenge) is environmental: namely, that they occupied professions requiring higher intelligence, giving them greater resources which resulted in more offspring. I have not seen this argument elicit the same sort of reaction, where the claims are met with vociferous denials about intelligence being subjected to evolutionary pressure.

It seems reasonable to believe that with the advent of social structures, the range of environmental selectors has been expanded beyond physical factors such as temperature, diseases, etc. Intelligence would probably be a large factor in resource acquisition within social structures. I find it odd that examining this sort of issue is taboo.

Have you ever examined fashion? Each season something new becomes popular and people acquire it to show they are the in crowd and look down on the out crowd. With beliefs this means parroting slogans and denouncing people who disagree. Religion is a formalized and (usually) controlled version of this; ideology is a non-sustainable version.

"I note that one of the proposed mechanisms for the development of higher IQ in Ashkenazi Jews (which, by the way, most people do not challenge) is environmental: namely, that they occupied professions requiring higher intelligence, giving them greater resources which resulted in more offspring."

All trait selection requires differential fertility; these means either selected for by the elite (and elite reproduce more then the rest of society), elimination of those with a trait (capital punishment for sociopaths) or social support (think the historic high levels of craftsmanship in certain countries).

The left can't admit this since their policies are dysgenic and taking whites and blacks through an IQ shredder.

MRI scans have revealed that Oriental people (Chinese, Japanese and Koreans) have brains that are on average one cubic inch larger than white European brains. Orientals score about 4 points higher on IQ tests than Europeans. Orientals do all those things, when living in the West, that we associate with people having a high IQ. They do well at school, they have low rates of crime, low rates of illegitimacy, low rates of poverty, low rates of unemployment, low rates of welfare dependency, high rates of academic achievement, and so on. There is thus no reason to doubt the IQ data since the world is exactly as it would be if the IQ data were true.

Darwin's theory of evolution, which all intelligent, progressive people are supposed to believe, actually predicts that the Races of Man, having been separated from one another for tens of thousands of years, will have developed over time different characteristics owing to the selective pressures of their several enviroments, and the brain is an organ just like any other. Indeed it would be miraculous and would prove there is a God if the brain had been exempt from the normal process of evolution.

So there are racial differences, and these racial differences are salient both to individual life outcomes and to public policy making in general.

"The fundamental question in this blog that wasn't answered in any satisfactory form concerns the rationale for believing that intelligence is not subject to evolutionary forces."
-Do you have compelling data that higher intelligence in humans results in increased fertility, or that this relationship is environmentally situational, such that it might have been under differential selective pressure between racial groups?

"Why should so many other characteristics (e.g., testosterone levels) differ between racial groups, but not intelligence?"
-The question isn't really whether they vary (though it is by no means logically necessary that they do), but whether they vary in *meaningful ways* that *explain* society's disparate outcomes for different racial groups, in a *more* logically compelling manner than historical, environmental, or socioeconomic factors.

If you take Skeptic's case, for instance, as it is the most cogent and fully elucidated example in the above discourse; it is positing that various racial groups' poor societal performance is fundamentally due to low IQ ( for American whites vs blacks as 1.1 SD or 20-ish points, though the gap has been closing, Dickens and Flynn 2006, itself a disputed paper) . He further asserts IQ is genetically determined by factors that are at unequal distribution between racial groups, resulting in racial differences in mean intelligence that are detectable by current intelligence tests (such as the IQ test). Several things have to be true for this thesis to be valid:
1) IQ must be a substantially genetic trait. This is a disputed by studies showing disparities in identical twin outcomes, based on their environment, as well as studies showing that certain groups have gained IQ points faster than genetic selection would allow. Specifically allowing for IQ and racial disparities, multiracial children (with at least one white parent) have no IQ or scoring gap, where if the cause of the gap were primarily genetic, one would expect them to be intermediate between white and black or Latino.

2) The alleles dictating differential intelligence within human populations must be differently distributed between racial groups. This is also unclear, since we do not have a great deal of knowledge about the genetic variants underpinning intelligence.

3) Racial groups (Asian American, African American, White American) have to be useful proxies for an underlying set of polymorphisms that are exclusive to one or another haplotype. This seems plausible, though it is notable that many population geneticists have concluded that race is a genetically meaningless classification.

4) IQ would have to substantially determine social success, rather than simply correlating with it. This is a point we have argued over extensively above, both as it applies to the national and individual level. I cite examples of low IQ countries that have better standards of living than high IQ countries. While he describes "Herculean" efforts to lift black people out of poverty, I find those efforts to be outweighed by the face of generations and generations of systematic oppression and exclusion from valuable wealth building programs (segregation of schools and exclusion from FHA [redlining] being prime examples). We also discuss the "model minority" myth that equates Asian American and Black American's histories of racial discrimination, where I highlight the differences in these two groups treatment, and point out that the vast majority of Asian Americans currently living here are (or are descended from) highly educated immigrants that came here in the last 70 years or so.

5) The IQ gap would have to be real. I generally think IQ is likely measuring something real, related to general intelligence which is disparate between the populations and so is an issue worthy of inquiry. Though there are many people that dismiss it entirely.

From my interpretation of the data, I do not find that these criteria have been supported to the extent that accepting Skeptic's argument is merited. As such, I'm disinclined to accept his/her (hereafter "his") policy recommendations based on this argument.
I am not flatly stating his argument is without merit because of the conclusions it makes, simply noting that those conclusions are not well supported.

I don't deny that evolution, in principle, is capable of shaping the brain's cognitive abilities. I'm agnostic as to whether human genetic variation makes meaningful contributions to intelligence, and whether these variants are differentially distributed between races as they are commonly conceived. I'd also like to point out that it is a fallacy to insist that if racially linked genetic components underlie Asian American's higher scores, than the converse (that they also underlie African American's poor performance) must be true.

I'll end with this. Perhaps some of the pushback or "taboo" that you receive towards people discussing these ideas are actually your continued insistence on psychologizing and delegitimizing your opponents and their argument.

I've laid out my case for my stance. They do not include:
White guilt
An urge to conform
Obeisance to PC culture
Fear of being targeted
A diversity fetish
A disbelieve in evolution
An excess of emotion or liberalness confounding my logic

I've refrained from speculating on your motives for purporting these theories of racial intelligence. You'd do well to extend others the same courtesy.